The Church (Michele Soavi, 1989)

Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi has worked in television for most of his career, but he built his reputation as a director with a handful of nutty horror films in the late '80s and early '90s, most of which were collaborations with Dario Argento, and he was an actor before he became a director, working for some of the biggest names in Italian horror (Argento, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci, Joe D'Amato, Lamberto Bava, Ruggero Deodato, Luigi Cozzi).

Soavi's most well-known horror film was also his last, Cemetery Man, a unique spin on the zombie movie that is one of the most effective hybrids of comedy and terror since Evil Dead 2. His other forays into the genre include slasher film StageFright, The Devil's Daughter aka The Sect (a decent Satanic cult movie with a memorably creepy opening scene), a documentary about Argento, and The Church, the second Catholic-themed horror movie I've reviewed on this site in a row.

The Church, co-written and produced by Argento and co-starring Argento's daughter Asia, opens with a lengthy Crusades-set scene in which Teutonic knights chase down, slaughter, and bury several villagers the knights claim to be demons. This period preamble is a bit clunky but reasonably entertaining, and despite the time it takes to set up the film's backstory, the audience is left with more questions than answers by the film's end, but you don't go to Italian horror for coherence. At least, I don't. The important thing is that a German cathedral (with Hungary standing in for Germany as a filming location) was built on top of the mass grave, and the cathedral's architect was killed and buried in his own creation because the church accused him of being an alchemist.

We jump to the present, and the movie grinds to a bit of a halt, aside from a few funny or inexplicable lines and character behaviors. This chunk of the film gives us the major players in the day-to-day life of the cathedral, much wandering in the catacombs below, a lot of secret parchment talk, and a relatively inert approach to pacing. (I'm a fan of a lot of Slow Cinema, but this part of the movie seems stuck in the mud.)

We're introduced to Lisa (Barbara Cupisti), a woman hired by the church to restore some frescoes, new church librarian Evan (Tomas Arana), a man who can't stop complaining about how many books he has to catalog (which got some good laughs from my archivist/librarian/records manager wife), the very old and very surly bishop (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.), the condescending reverend (Giovanni Lombardo Ridice), kindly Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie), and the sacristan Hermann (Roberto Corbiletto), his wife (Aline De Simone), and their daughter Lotte (Asia Argento), who is in her early teen years and getting rebellious. She's also the only one who knows a secret exit from the cathedral (this will be important later).

The movie sets up Lisa and Evan as the main protagonists, though they're a little underdeveloped and dull, but the movie really gets cooking when they become peripheral characters and Soavi focuses on the ensemble. The Church's second half delivers the weird shit, with all our main characters and a disparate group of people (a wedding party and their photographer, schoolkids and their teacher, a near-breakup young couple with motorcycle trouble, a hilariously dubbed elderly couple) trapped in the cathedral as demonic possession spreads like wildfire. The movie really picks up here (and a few scenes before), and we get lots of Argento-esque camera moves, creative deaths, Satanic shenanigans, and unpredictable strangeness. I wish the whole movie had this spirit and energy.

The Church was initially supposed to be the third film in Lamberto Bava's Demons trilogy, but, after much pre-production work, Bava lost interest and abandoned the movie. Inheriting the project, Soavi decided to turn it from a sequel into a standalone film, greatly revising the screenplay. I wish he'd revised the boring middle chunk even more, but he brings the heat otherwise.

The Church has its moments, but it's not as strong as the other Soavi films I've seen. I recommend it if you're a diehard Italian horror fan who's already seen the masterpieces or to anyone who wants to see a demon squeeze a lady's butt (that's all of us, right?). It's mostly a good time (except for the middle stretch), and the score is by Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Keith Emerson and soundtrack legends Goblin (though it's mid-tier work from both of them). I think it also needs to be mentioned that the soundtrack includes a song called "Go to Hell" by a band called Zooming on the Zoo. That's an impressively awful band name.

House of Mortal Sin aka The Confessional (Pete Walker, 1976)

You may recall that I reviewed another Pete Walker movie, The Comeback, a few months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it even though many Walker superfans think it's one of his weakest films. With my second foray into the Pete Walker oeuvre, I may be joining those superfan ranks (but I will never think The Comeback is weak).

The two Walker films I've seen so far share a rich color palette, a striking sense of both interior and exterior space, and a strong visual point of view with confident mastery of atmosphere and tone, and both of them manage to exist comfortably within their contradictions (subtlety and garishness, realism and expressive exaggeration, seriousness and tongue-in-cheek humor, warmth and ultra-bleak pessimism, tastefulness and bad taste). I like the cut of this Walker fella's jib.

House of Mortal Sin, also known as The Confessional and The Confessional Murders in some prints and video versions, is an oddball character study of a demented Catholic priest, a slasher movie, a suspense thriller, a blistering critique of enforced celibacy in the priesthood, and a charming snapshot of Surrey, England in the mid-1970s. It also contains one of my favorite lines of dialogue, spoken with withering contempt: "I have little regard for the whims of renegade Belgian cardinals!" I was raised Catholic, so a horror movie about a killer priest really gets my mojo working, but I'm pretty sure I would enjoy this movie no matter my religious background. By the way, it's no spoiler that the priest is a murderous psychopath. The film gives you that information pretty early in the running time.

Another thing House of Mortal Sin shares with The Comeback is a cast full of intriguing characters, several of whom share space in a visually appealing location. In this case, those locations are a tchotchke shop in downtown Surrey with living quarters above the shop, and a demonic-looking small Catholic church with adjoining rectory and cemetery. Characters frequently mention how close the church is to the library, but, alas, we never get a glimpse of that library.

About those characters. Jenny Welch (Susan Penhaligon) is a young woman living with her sister Vanessa (Stephanie Beacham) in the apartment above Vanessa's knick-knack shop. Jenny's on-again, off-again boyfriend Terry (Stewart Bevan) sometimes lives there, too, to Vanessa's annoyance. Terry is a record plugger, which in UK parlance means he's either a guy who pitches unsigned bands to record labels or a guy who tries to get singles played on radio stations. Either way, he gets a lot of free records, which is the only thing Vanessa likes about him.

One afternoon, Jenny absentmindedly walks into traffic and narrowly misses a collision with a car. That car is driven by old friend Bernard Cutler (Norman Eshley), who, in the years since they lost touch, has become a hip, young Catholic priest. Father Bernard reconnects with Jenny and Vanessa (whom he once dated and is still attracted to, despite his priestly vows), and, in between places to live while he assists the neighborhood priest and awaits an assignment of his own, moves in with the sisters above their shop.

That night, Jenny, upset from her most recent breakup with Terry and the circumstances surrounding it, rushes to the church to speak to Bernard for advice but is rattled when he's not on duty. Instead, she ends up in a confessional talking to the aforementioned neighborhood priest, Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp, giving it all he's got and a couple barrels more, and coming off performances in Barry Lyndon and the hilariously titled One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing and The Amorous Milkman).

Father Meldrum is one crazy, unpleasant, and creepy son of a bitch, to put it mildly, and Jenny's ill-timed confessional visit is enough to make him dangerously obsessed with her. This obsession leads to Meldrum stalking and harassing Jenny and killing anyone else who gets in his way. Jenny tries to tell everyone about Meldrum, but no one believes her because she's a young woman and Meldrum is a priest, with a cunning ability to cover his tracks even as his behavior becomes more brazen.

Meldrum's domestic life is almost as insane as he is. His mute, frail, and elderly mother lives in an upstairs bedroom of the rectory, reachable by a small, manual elevator, and Meldrum frequently and obliviously unloads disturbing monologues about his desire for Jenny onto his clearly freaked out old mum. She gets even worse treatment from the housekeeper/caretaker, Miss Brabazon (Sheila Keith, veteran of several Walker films), a sadistic and slyly funny weirdo with one darkly tinted frame in her eyeglasses and a decades-long secret.

House of Mortal Sin did not please British Catholics, and the film was the subject of much controversy in the UK upon initial release. Not even two sympathetic (but anti-celibacy) priest characters could make up for one homicidal one and a consistent critique of church policy. For the non-prudes among you who love horror movies with well-developed characters, a strong visual point of view, loads of atmosphere, great locations, some pretty sweet kills, and righteous takedowns of institutional hypocrisy, however, House of Mortal Sin is well worth your time. I'm ready for more Pete Walker.